Leiden University Library owns a small mid-fifteenth-century anthology of Middle English poetry (Vossius Germ. Gall. Q.9). Written in three hands on a mixture of parchment and paper gatherings, this anthology contains fourteen of John Lydgate's short poems, three excerpts from his Fall of Princes, two of Geoffrey Chaucer's short poems, and eight anonymous poems. Because of its contents, the book is generally known among scholars as the “Leyden Lydgate Manuscript” and has offered useful witnesses to several of Lydgate's and the two Chaucer poems. This manuscript also offers the only known witness to four of its eight anonymous poems. In one of these – a two-stanza ballade in rime royal I entitle here “Vpon temse” – the narrator recounts a dream as follows:

Though “Vpon temse” concludes before much happens, leaving us perhaps with a sense of incompleteness, this engagingly brief poem raises a number of interesting questions about medieval poetics and reading practices key to the present study.

As with most if not all first-person medieval narratives, the poet of “Vpon temse” creates a world in which a narrator – the poem's “I” – recounts a personal event – the dream – to what Gerald Prince calls a narratee, that is, the narrator's addressee as inscribed in the text. This narratee presumably understands the narrator's discourse completely and is implied throughout but especially in the narrator's twice-used emphatic phrase “that neuer sawe j.” In this phrase the personal pronoun “I” implies a “you” to whom the “I” addresses the discourse, the pattern of which is as follows: I (the subject) describe my dream (the object) to you (the implicit indirect object).